


and over our heads the gray light unwinding

by radialarch



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: First Time, M/M, Miscommunication, Post-Episode 11, blowjobs: unfortunately not substitute for conversation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8867917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/pseuds/radialarch
Summary: It turns out, Yuuri and Victor have been having two different conversations.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nescienx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nescienx/gifts), [starstrung](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/gifts).



> Instigated, with devastating precision, by Mari & Mae, and encouraged far too gleefully by Idril; but I admit the final blame is all mine.

They get back to the hotel room in the evening, as the sky’s starting to turn dark, and Yuuri takes the first shower because he’s learned by now just how long Victor can take.

It’s quick, because he doesn’t want to give himself time to think; but then they switch places and Yuuri’s left sitting on the bed, listening to the sound of the water running, and it turns out he has nothing to do _but_ think.

Victor had looked happy today — there’d been something like joy in him, watching Yurio skate, and Chris, and all the others. Maybe it was easy to forget, when the force of Victor’s exuberance had been carrying him along like a wave, but Victor’s first love would always be skating.

This chance to be with Victor had been a gift. And now — he’d run out of his borrowed time, that’s all.

“Yuuri,” Victor says, coming out of the bathroom in one of the fluffy complimentary robes. “You look so serious, what are you thinking?”

“I —” Yuuri falters. “I was just thinking about tomorrow.”

“You’re not worried, are you?” Victor doesn’t come to sit next to him; instead, he sets himself on the floor by Yuuri’s feet, his shoulder nudging into Yuuri’s knee. “You shouldn’t think about it too much, you won’t skate well this way. Just feel everything you want the music to say.”

But what he feels — 

“Victor,” he starts, then stops at the touch on his ankle.

“How are your feet?”

An old ritual. “Fine.”

Victor looks ruefully at one of his own feet, folded under him. “Love doesn’t always mean pain, you know,” he says. “Stay here, let me put something on them.”

Yuuri doesn’t remember when this first started: Victor, smoothing salve over the bruises and scrapes of the day. He’s memorized the careful way Victor cups the heel of his feet, the gentle slide of his fingers along the arches, but somehow his memory won’t stretch back to the beginning, the time _before_ ,when he didn’t have that at all.

He won’t have it after tomorrow.

“Victor,” he says again, and finds that Victor’s thrown both his arms around Yuuri’s knees.

“No matter what happens,” Victor says, looking up from where he’s laid his head on Yuuri’s thigh, “you know that I’ll be proud of you, right?”

Yuuri’s always cried easily, but the hot sting of tears that hits him now just isn’t _fair_. 

“I’m glad,” he says, swallowing to keep his voice steady. “I wouldn’t want you to regret —”

Victor grasps at Yuuri with a sudden fierceness. “I don’t,” he says. “Yuuri. There’s nothing about you that could make me regret this. Any of this.”

A moment, while Victor stares up at him; then, slowly, he presses forward into the space between Yuuri’s knees.

“You’ve never had a lover,” Victor says. His palm, splayed over Yuuri’s thigh, suddenly feels as hot as a brand.

“Never the right time,” Yuuri says, through a throat gone very dry. “I was always so busy. Too focused on skating, and —”

 _And you_.

“I’ve always thought it a little like skating,” Victor says, thoughtful. “Will you let me show you?”

The look on Victor’s face is something Yuuri’s never seen before, tender and a little wistful, and Yuuri thinks: maybe this is what Victor looks like when he’s saying goodbye.

Yuuri is not a saint. He doesn’t know when his old hero-worship had turned into full-throated love, but he has wanted Victor for a long, long time. So he nods, and watches Victor’s hands slide the boxers off his hips like he’s doing it to someone else.

His dick is only half hard when Victor lifts it up from between his thighs. Victor sits back to consider it briefly, tapping his mouth with one finger, and then leans forward to drop a swift kiss to the head.

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise Yuuri so much; and maybe it shouldn’t make him flush with arousal, this familiar habit of Victor’s brought to the bedroom. But all the air goes out of his lungs anyway, and Victor’s pleased enough at that to do it again, following it up with a quick swipe of his tongue.

“Victor,” Yuuri says, because it’s unfair for Victor to tease like this when Yuuri’s trying to let him go. Unfair that Victor should be so spectacular, and so easy to love. Long after he’s gone back to Russia, there will be some imprint of him left in Yuuri’s heart, and Yuuri still doesn’t know if he’s grateful for it.

“You’re thinking,” Victor says, one hand sliding along Yuuri’s thigh. “Going somewhere else. Stay with me, look at me, don’t _think_ ,” and this time, when he presses his mouth to Yuuri’s cock, he does more than just kiss.

Yuuri comes quietly, one hand on Victor’s shoulder and the other clutching at the top sheet. It’s quick, but he’s wrung out and exhausted enough that embarrassment is a distant afterthought. Victor leaves a long, lingering kiss on the inside of Yuuri’s thigh, while Yuuri’s trying to catch his breath, and wrangles him into bed after despite Yuuri’s protests. 

“But Victor, don’t you want —” 

“Your free skate,” Victor says, sliding the blanket over him. “You need your rest, Yuuri, no arguing about it.”

Victor shuts off the light. But Yuuri stays awake, his head a swirl of thoughts, until he says, quietly into the dark, “Victor? What did you think of today?”

Victor’s quiet for long enough that Yuuri thinks maybe he’s already asleep. And then he says, just as quiet, “I thought, I’d like to live like this always.”

 

 

Yuuri is third in line for the free skate. Victor frowns at him when he comes off the ice from warm-ups. “Yuuri, don’t think. _Feel_.”

This is what Yuuri feels: Regret. Sorrow. And joy, because Victor had found him, and they’d created something together. Victor had made him stronger, and that means —

Yuuri thinks he’s strong enough now, to let him go.

JJ and Phichit have skated their hearts out, and now it’s his turn. He steps out from Victor’s embrace — leaves behind the warmth of his arms, the familiar tone of his voice — and waits for the music to start.

 

 

He lands the quad flip. One last gift, for Victor.

 

 

“I don’t understand,” Victor says as they’re waiting at the kiss and cry. “Yuuri, that was beautiful, but so — sad.”

“After this,” Yuuri says, “I’m going to retire.”

Victor opens his mouth to speak.

“You said you’d help me win the Grand Prix Final,” Yuuri keeps going. “Victor. I never would’ve gotten this far without you. But you — you have to go back to skating. It’s what you love best.”

The score flashes onto the screen right then, and the cheers drown out whatever Victor starts to say.

 

 

He scores a personal best for his free skate; he places second at the Grand Prix Final. There’s a press conference, and endless photographs, and afterwards Minako and Mari and Phichit crowd all around him, trying to speak all at once.

“Yuuri,” Mari says, wiping away tears, “that was incredible, baby brother.”

“I’m glad at least one of us could medal,” Phichit says, only a little subdued. “Let’s do it together next time, all right?”

Minako throws herself at him, crying too hard to speak. It takes a long time for her sobs to come out resembling anything like words. “I’m so proud,” she finally hiccups out, stepping back, “I knew you could do it,” then enfolds him in another hug that crushes all the air out of him.

“But wait,” she says finally, when she’s all out of tears. “Where’s Victor? Shouldn’t he be here congratulating you too?”

“Victor —” Yuuri pauses. “He said he needed to do something.”

“What, _now_? God, that man has the worst timing.”

“Listen,” he says apologetically. “I’m sorry, but I — I’d like some time to myself, too.”

It’s Mari who reacts first. “Oh, Yuuri,” she says. “What did you do?”

 

 

He takes a walk, trying to avoid all the places he’d visited with Victor the last time, and ends up by the ocean. It’s getting dark, but the sound of waves and the smell of salt are still familiar enough to be a comfort.

He still has the ring on his finger. He should take it off, he thinks, but can’t make himself do it.

He’s sitting there, trying not to think and rubbing slowly at the ring with his thumb, when Victor finds him.

“Yuuri,” Victor says, already tugging at his shoulder impatiently. “Come with me.”

“Victor —?”

“ _Words_ ,” Victor says, “stupid, I could never — it’s so hard to talk, and get it right, but I thought — never mind. You have to _see_.”

Yuuri doesn’t understand, but he lets himself be dragged along, while Victor mutters in Russian the entire time.

 

 

It turns out, what Victor wants is to break into the rink.

“Not a break-in,” Victor mutters, fumbling with a key at the side door. “I had to ask — a favor, and his daughter was a fan — aha.” 

Only some of the lights are on, casting strange shadows across the ice. It reminds Yuuri of Hasetsu, of Ice Castle after hours. There, skating into position in the quiet, he’d sometimes feel halfway between an intruder and a secret.

That’s what it feels like now.

Victor presses Yuuri down onto a bench holding a skate bag, and drops next to him in turn. “I’ve been thinking about this,” he says. There are two pairs of skates in the bag, his and Victor’s; Victor pulls his out, and begins to lace up. “This piece. When I saw you skate, I thought, _how did he know?_ But you didn’t. Of course you didn’t. Not the whole thing.” He stands. “Watch, Yuuri. Please.”

Yuuri knows what Victor is about to skate almost before he moves: his free program from last season. Yuuri had loved it the moment he saw Victor skate it, the very first competition of the season, and fell in love more when, still trying to pick himself back up, he’d put himself into the routine piece by piece.

Eight months since Victor came to Hasetsu, and he hasn’t seen Victor skate this in all that time.

The song had always had a melancholy air, to Yuuri’s ear. But it had never been like this — Victor skates with a despair that cuts deep, like his heart is breaking. Victor skates, Yuuri thinks, like the way he’d felt last night.

Then — a change. Yuuri knows the routine by heart, but Victor’s slipped into something else. He becomes less frantic. There’s a sweetness to his movements that reminds Yuuri, absurdly, of cherry blossoms in the spring. 

It comes to an end; Victor seems frozen in time, on his knee with his hand reaching forward, before he stands, tiredly, and skates back to the boards.

Yuuri is on his feet. “Victor!”

“You know what the piece is called,” Victor says, half a question.

“ _Stammi Vicino Non Te Ne Andare_.” Yuuri’s tongue trips over the unfamiliar Italian. “‘Stay by my side, and never leave.’”

“A friend of mine composed it,” Victor offers. “But he didn’t actually compose it for me.”

“You never used to talk about it,” Yuuri frowns. “They’d ask, and you’d say the program should tell its own story.”

“It’s a sordid little tale,” Victor says. “You see, I stole it.”

Yuuri’s puzzlement must be evident on his face, because Victor laughs.

“Well, maybe _steal_ isn’t the right word. I was visiting one day, and he asked me to listen — this new piece he’d been working on. So I did, and then I said, I’d like to use this for next season, if you’d please — with a change.”

“A change.”

“It was originally a duet.”

Victor might have hit Yuuri over the head with a brick, and stunned him less.

“Just the first part, I told him,” Victor continues. “He was rather upset about it, and then quite sad. In fact, I have a vivid memory of him shouting at me, ‘I write about love, but you only see loneliness.’”

“So when you saw me skate —” Yuuri says, stumbling for the conclusion.

“Yesterday was one of the happiest days of my life,” Victor says. “But not because of the competition, not because I wanted to go back. Yuuri, I’ve been skating nearly my whole life, and I’d always done it alone. But yesterday, it was with you.”

Yuuri thinks his heart might be pounding its way out of his chest.

“Stay,” Victor says. “Skate with me. Don’t leave. Not because I’m your coach, but because —”

“— I love you.” 

Nothing to hide behind now; nothing to hide, either. He loves Victor: the way he skates, the way he laughs, the way he _feels_ , with all his heart, and never hesitates to share. 

Victor’s smile is blinding.

Yuuri steps into his skates, and takes Victor’s hand.


End file.
